Donald Clark Plan B

What is Plan B? Not Plan A!

Monday, July 28, 2014

10 counter-intuitive, researched tips on use of video in learning

When considering video what do key pieces of research say
about impact on learning outcomes. As it turns out video may seem instinctively
useful but that is not always the case. Our limitations in terms of working
memory, episodic & semantic memory, attention and perceptual systems all
play a role in limiting the effectiveness of video. Understand how the mind
works and you can use video more effectively and cheaply. Here’s seven
research-based facts that you should perhaps consider when using video in
learning:

1. Media rich not
always mind rich

Intuitively we may feel that rich, high quality, high
production value video with animation, graphics, background sound, music and
narration makes for great learning. But the evidence suggests otherwise. This
approach can often result in ‘seductive but irrelevant distractions’. Meyer and
Moreno have researched this area in detail and found that cognitive overload
and dissonance can often occur when too much information is being presented.
Controlling the load on working memory is an important consideration. Lesson: video
is not always a good medium for learning. Lesson: Video can inhibit as well as
enhance learning.

2. Attention maxes
out at 6 mins

Philip Guo has tracked median engagement times versus video length,
aggregated over several million EdX maths and science video sessions. He found
that the average engagement time of any video maxes out markedly at 6 minutes,
regardless of its length. An interesting side finding was that students who had
enrolled for the certificate engaged more with the videos. Lesson: keep videos
below 6 minutes.

3, No to 1 hour lectures (even chopped)

The edX researchers, confirmed by the MOOC factory in
Lausanne, have found that, in addition to avoiding the dreaded 1 hour lectures,
one should also avoid simply chopping up the existing 1 hour lecture into 6
minute chunkes. Take time to rework and rehearse the chunks as small videos in themselves,
not the result of meat-chopper editing.

4. Stay personal,
informal & enthusiastic

An interesting research finding from MOOCs, where huge amounts
of video have been used by millions of learners is that learners don’t like
over-produced, TV quality presentation. They much prefer more informal,
personal and, above all, enthusiastic performances by their teachers. Hesitations,
a chatty relaxed style even corrected errors. Lesson: More YouTube than TV.

5. Image quality NOT
key

Most video cameras these days produce good pictures. Even
then you really have to know about ISO, depth of field, framing and so on to
get the best results. However, on the basic issue of picture quality, it
doesn’t matter that musch when it comes to retention.

6. Audio quality IS
key

Poor quality video quality is rarely the problem when it
comes to learning and retention. Bad audio can, however, cripple both. . are
not necessarily damaging in terms of learning and retention, poor quality audio,
however, is bad news. Nass & Reeves showed that poor audio, hissy, distant
or robotic can seriously affect retention.

7. Do not mix video
& text

Video and accompanying text is a no-no. Never put the script
up at the same time as the video. It overloads working memory and damages
learning. Mayer (2001
suggests that both a visual and a narrative description increases the amount of
time information about the process can be held and processed in working memory,
leading to measurable, lower retention.

8. Worked examples

In research on 862 videos from four edX courses, for
subjects that rely on symbolic, semantic reasoning, such as maths, physics and
coding, worked examples (a la Khan Academy or Udacity) work far better.

9. Size matters

In an HCI course I took the talking head was postage size
stamp size in the bottom right of the screen. Nass and Reeves showed that
screen size does matter when it comes to reaction.As my BBC film editor used to say – it’s all
in the eyes.

10. Alternate heads
& images

With talking heads, go full screen and alternate with
slides. Use talking heads for conceptual explanation and slides for diagrams,
images and pictures that really do explain a point and don’t merely illustrate
the point.

Conclusion

There’s lots more to be said about the use of video in
learning. I’ve been using it for over 30 years and all of the above are
confirmed by that vast and wonderful experiment – YouTube. There’s lots of
different types of video and when it comes to learning, it is vital that the
optimal technique is used. TV and film, in that sense, are not the most useful
guides as, for learning, you often have to break their rules.

Leadership: the weasel word that led to bad management

We have fetishised the word 'Leader'. You're a leader, I'm a leader, we're all leaders now - rendering the word completely meaningless. What
do you do for a living? I’m a ‘leader’. Cue laughter and ridicule. Have you
ever heard anyone in an organisation say, “We need to ask out ‘Leader’?” - only
if it was sneering sarcasm. The bottom line is that no one in the real word uses the word. It's a bureaucratic construct used only in courses and organisational charts. No person in their right mind would call themselves a leader to someone's face. Describe yourself as my 'Leader' and I'd dismiss you as someone lacking the skills to manage me. In fact, introduce yourself to me as my leader and I'd think you were the opposite.What HR has missed, is that in the real world it's a pejorative term. We need to be far more critical of this terminology and the 'leadership' craze. If you teach this stuff, what exactly have you 'led'? What evidence do you have for the things you are calling 'leadership? It was invented by people who sell management training to fool us all into thinking that it's a noble calling. It’s all a bit phoney, exaggerated but a more worrying proposition is that it may also lead to dysfunctional behaviour?

Weasel words

When I first started in the learning world over 30 years ago
‘Leader’ was not a word I heard at all. There was plenty of good management
theory and training and most people who headed up companies were called
Managing Directors. Then the tech bubble came along in the 90s and we all went
gaga for snazzy, new US terms and everyone swapped out the sober and
descriptive MD for CEO (Chief Executive Officer) (I’m guilty here). The word
‘Chief’ is an interesting choice. You were no longer someone who ‘managed’
others but the big chief, big cheese, a big shot. It was then that another word was plucked from the shelves of the sweet shop that is faddish HR theory – ‘leader’. Suddenly,
managers weren’t people with competences but top dogs who ‘led’ people towards
victory. Mike, senior manager in accounts, was now a dog of war.

Leadership platitudes
The first problem was was the flood of platitudes that accompanied the word 'leadership'. Leadership is , , noun

>..... that's the problem right there. Lacking any depth of analysis or solid theory, HR and Learning & Development re-badged any old management theory courses they had lying around into 'Leadership' courses. As long as you knew what the the acronym SWOT meant, you were a leader. To get an idea of how superficial this has become, check out any Twitterchat on Leadership and marvel at the shallowness of the debate. Leadership is, apparently, any old cliche.

Followers

Using the word 'Leader' creates a sense of us and them. Leaders are the aristocracy in an organisation, everyone else is a working serf or follower. In a sense the word
infers that the people you lead and manage are followers. It sets you apart
from other people, not a great quality in management. Of course, leadership
trainers will tell you that it’s not about creating followers, but in practice
this is the effect the word creates and management trainers jump through hoops
to reconcile this leader/follower dilemma. If you want to avoid this problem, simply
don’t use the word ‘leader’.

Leadership courses

When the language changed so did the training. HR bods were
suddenly the leading thinkers on leadership. HR and training departments saw an
opportunity to big-up their status by breeding, not managers, but leaders. Middle
managers went on ‘leadership’ courses run by people who had never led anything,
except flipchart workshops, in their entire lives. In practice this meant
cobbling together stuff from existing management courses and adding a veneer of
specious content from books on leadership. Winging it became a new course
design methodology and every management trainer in the land suddenly became a
leadership trainer, allowing them to add a few bucks onto their daily rate.

Middle managers went crazy for books they’d never dreamt of
reading. I’ve seen everything from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius to Lao Tzu’s
Art of War touted as serious management texts. I knew it had all gone seriously
wrong when I saw a commuter, with a bad suit and combination lock briefcase, on
the 7.15 from Brighton to London, reading ‘The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan’.
What next? Hitler, Stalin… Pol Pot?

Led to the abyss

Managers loved their new found status as little generals,
leading the troops. They responded to the training as narcissists respond to
flattery, with gusto. I don’t think it’s an accident that this coincided with
the megalomaniac behaviour in the banks where ‘leaders’ fed on a high-octane
diet of ‘leadership’ training, ‘led’ us into the abyss of financial collapse.
These ‘leaders’ adopted delusional strategies based on over-confidence and a
lack of reality. There’s a price to pay for believing that you’re destined to
‘lead’ – realism. Managers who now saw themselves as ‘Leaders of the pack’
engaged in behaviours that flowed from the word. They became driven by their
own goals and not the goals of the organisation or others. It also led to
greater differentials between leader and follower salaries.

Conclusion

We have seen leaders in every area of human endeavour
succumb to the tyranny of ‘leadership’, in business, politics, newspapers,
sport, even the police. Rather than focus on competences and sound management;
fuelled by greed, they focused on personal rewards and ‘go for broke’
strategies. So what happened to these ’leaders’? Did they lose their own money?
No. Did any go to jail? No. Are they still around? Yes. Have we reflected on whether
all of that ‘leadership’ malarkey was right? NO. Let’s get real and go back to
realistic learning and realistic titles.

Friday, July 25, 2014

MOOC points from my son, a real learner

For the last 9 weeks I have been enrolled
in a Coursera MOOC ‘An Introduction to Marketing’, run by Wharton at the
University of Pennsylvania. Here’s the question; was it worth it and have my
marketing skills improved? YES & YES!

I have to admit, nine weeks ago, I was
skeptical and slightly reluctant to set aside time over nine weeks for this course, as I had
looked at others that were not so good and weaker on content. Strangely, the
thing that attracted me to this course was the nice certificate at the end that
I could link to my LinkedIn profile. To do this I had to sign up for the
‘Signature track’. This cost £30, didn’t break the bank, but gave me a goal, made
me care and kept me going.

Context mattersI had a quick look at some of the lectures
and was hooked. They were not hour-long, boring videos of a dull Prof talking at
me, they were 10 minute videos, well made in different consumer locations, with
interesting people, explaining things in context. For example, I really
appreciated the insights into the difference between product and
customer-centric companies. It was this contextual approach that worked for me.
I liked this real-world application side as that’s the world in which I have to
apply my skills.

Quizzes kept me goingEvery so often, the video would stop and I
had to answer a question on what I had just seen, keeping me engaged and not allowing
me to simply go with the flow, immersing me in theory until I drowned. The
module quizzes also keep you on your marketing toes as it’s easy to just drift
along without reflection.

Useful appI quickly downloaded the app so I could dip
in and out when I had a free 10 minutes. That is exactly what I did. Every
night, before I went to bed, I watched one quick lecture, at my own pace, until
I understood the concepts. This was the perfect amount of learning for me as I
have a job, play the drums and all that stuff. Whenever I had a bit of free time,
I’d do it – even at 3/4am - that suits me, as when I felt productive, I’d get a
load done. I felt in control.

The Prof got back to me!I could interact with different students on
the forums, reading what they had written from their experiences. I didn’t
spend a huge amout of time on the forums but they were interesting. I did ask some
questions, to which the professors promptly replied. It was cool to get a reply
from the Prof on a question I asked about ‘Celebrity endorsements’. For once
learning was a pleasant experience!

Tests not tricksTests came frequently and I scored 100% in
all of them (honestly!). These really made me focus on the content and commit
to remembering what I had learnt. Now I look back on it, I realize that these
first tests weren’t trying to trick me , judge me or confuse me (that’s what
tests and exams have always felt like), but asking me if I really knew
something. If I found it hard, I could flip to the lecture and seal up any gaps.
Only the last and longest test was a struggle, asking me more in-depth
questions and making me project what I had learnt onto different situations. This
was challenging but that’s exactly what I needed, as I was doing this, not as a
course, but as a way of improving my marketing skills for my job.

Overall, a good MOOC has a good set of
people behind it, professors who are clearly excited by the fact they are
teaching an unlimited amount of people and are passionate about that. I like
the idea that I can shop around, find the MOOC that suits me, and the
convenience of doing it when it suited me, usually late at night.

Final thoughts
Did I like the MOOC? Hell yeah. Did I learn
much? Absolutely. Was it useful? My job is in social media marketing and this
gave me some depth of understanding on mainstream marketing. Would I do
another? Already started.

This is my LinkedIn profile with the certificate. I am a marketing person after all ;)PS
I missed something. My employer encouraged
me to take this sort of course and the fact that I can take my certificate
(with distinction!) back to him is a big plus.

Sunday, July 06, 2014

6 reasons why we don't need ‘mentors’

I’ve never had a mentor. I don’t want a mentor. I don’t like
mentoring. I know this is swimming against the tide of liberal orthodoxy but I
value liberal values more than I value fads, groupthink or orthodoxy. But there’s
many reasons why I’m both suspicious of and reject mentoring.

1. Fictional
constructs

Mentor was a character in Homer’s The Odyssey and it is
often assumed that his role was one of a guiding, experienced hand for his son
and family. This is false. Mentor was simply an old acquaintance, ill-qualified
play a protective role to his family, and worse, turned out to be a patsy for a
hidden force, the God Athena. A similar tale has unfolded in recent times, with
mentoring being revived on the back of late 19th century
psychoanalytic theory, where the original theory has been abandoned but the
practice upon which it is based survives.

There is another later work of fiction that resurrected the
classical model as a source for the word ‘mentor’ in education, Fenelon’s Les Adventures de Telemaque (1699). This
is a tale about limiting the excesses of a king but it did reinforce the
presence of the word ‘mentor’ in both French, then English. Yet Mentor in this
ponderous novel is prone to didactic speeches about how a king should rule
(aided by the aristocracy), hardly the egalitarian text one would expect to
spark a revolution in education. Interestingly, it pops up again as one of two
books given to Emile in the novel of the same name, by Rousseau.

2. Psychoanalytic veneer

Mentoring came out of the psychanalytic movement in
education with Freud and Rogers. Nothing survives of Freud’s theories on the
mind, education, dreams, humour or anything else for that matter. But Rogers is
different. His legacy is more pernicious, like pollution seeping into the water
table. His work has resulted in institutional practice that has hung around many
decades after the core theories have been abandoned. We need to learn how to
abandon practice when the theories are defunct.

3. Mentoring is a
trap

As Homer actually showed, one person is not enough.To limit your path, in work or life,
to one person is to be feeble when it comes to probability. Why choose one
person (often that person is chosen for you) when there are lots of good people
out there. It stands to reason that a range of advice on a range of diverse topics
(surely work and life are diverse) needs a range of expertise. Spread your
network, speak to a range and variety of people. Don’t get caught in one
person’s spider’s web. Mentoring is a trap.

4. People, social media, books etc. are better

You don’t need a single person, you need advice and
expertise. That is to be found in a range of resources. Sure, a range of people
can do the job and hey - the best write books. Books are cheap, so buy some of the
best and get reading. You can do it where and when you want and they’re written
by the world’s best, not just the person who has been chosen in your
organisation or a local life coach. And if you yearn for that human face, try
video – TED and YouTube – they’re free! I’d take a portion of the training
budget and allow people to buy from a wide reading list, arther than institute
expensive mentoring programmes. Then there's socil media a rich source of advice and guidance provided daily. This makes people more self-reliant, rather
than being infantalised.

5. Absence of proof

Little (1990:297) warned us, on mentoring, that, “relative to the amount of pragmatic
activity, the volume of empirical enquiry is small [and]... that rhetoric and
action have outpaced both conceptual development and empirical warrant.” This, I fear, is not unusual in the learning
world.

Where such research is conducted the results are
disappointing. Mentors are often seen as important learning resources in teacher
education and in HE teaching development. Empirical research shows, however,
that the potential is rarely realised (Edwards and Protheroe, 2003: 228; Boice,
1992: 107). The results often reveal low level "training" that simply
instruct novices on the "correct" way to teach (Handal and Lauvas,
1988: 65; Hart-Landsberg et al., 1992: 31). Much mentoring has been
found to be rather shallow and ineffective (Edwards, 1998: 55-56).

6. Fossilised
practice

Practice gets amplified and proliferates through second-rate
train the trainer and teacher training courses, pushing orthodoxies long after
their sell-by, even retirement, date. Mentoring has become a lazy option and
alternative for hard work, effort, real learning and reflection. By all means
strive to acquire knowledge, skills and competences, but don’t imagine that any
of this will come through mentoring.

Conclusion: get a
life, not a coach

I know that many of you will feel uncomforted by these
arguments but work and life are not playthings. It’s your life and career, so
don’t for one minute imagine that the HR department has the solutions you need.
Human resources is there to protect organisations from their employees, so is
rarely either human or resourceful. Stay away from this stuff if you really
want to remain independently human and resourceful.